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Month: January 2014

A home inspection is a buyers first defense when buying a home, it’s what prevents your from borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the next 30 years to only buy a home that’s falling down, a severe fire hazard or just going to cost to much to fix back up. A home inspection costs about $350, often though buyers try to covnice me they don’t need to hire a professional home inspector, they have a handy uncle or in the case I’m going to tell you a Father-In-Law that used to be a home inspector but didn’t inspect too many homes (experience counts too, not necessarily years but how often they work), it went even more poorly than I expected.

Several weeks after the home buyer I was working with, we’ll call her Jackie, had her home inspection finished and a mere one day after closing on her new dream home Jackie called me in a panic saying when she flushed her toilet it backed up into bathtub, which is a sign of a pretty big problem. I had Jackie call her home warranty company, 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty, we provide most of our home buyers with a warranty to help pay for anything that may arise in the first year of owning a home, to get a plumber out ASAP to fix what was probably going to be a thousand dollar problem thankfully for only a little over $100 which is the cost of the deductible.

The plumber discovered that the seller had a pipe burst and since they didn’t live at the home just taped up a rubber sleeve with not even plumbers tape, but athletic tape and saved themselves a pretty hefty plumbing bill. In the words of the plumber, “They just tried to pass the inspection.” The pipes were in the crawl space, a little bit up the wall in a space that any quality home inspector would have seen when in the crawl space inspecting the home and we would have had this paid for by the seller long before closing and before having some gross stuff float into the tub. The total repair ended up costing $1,820 just a day after closing, thankfully because of the warranty almost all of that was covered even though there was some pretty obvious fraud by the seller. You can’t always trust who you buy a home from but when spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a home you should be willing to invest a few hundred extra on making sure you are buying a home devoid of any odd defects, it’s a much better investment than getting all of the furniture you want on the first day in your new home which is what our home buyer did. A home inspection is remarkably important, we recommend a home inspector that goes through every single part of the home and explains every issue to you so you can make an informed decision, anything short of that gets you into the type of trouble Jackie got in.